Grammar in Theory and in Practice

Book excerpt: What are word classes? How can we recognize them? What role do they play in regards to punctuation? Grammar in Theory and in Practice was written for those who want straight answers, in plain English, to these crucial, yet rarely asked, questions.This essential guide empowers students to identify parts of speech rapidly, to employ punctuation marks confidently, and to examine syntax precisely, in four popular GCSE texts: Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Frankenstein, and 1984. Grammatical categories are neatly defined in the glossary, and each chapter is packed with practical and demanding exercises, testing your knowledge of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. Topics range from the relatively simple, such as common pronoun errors or subject-verb agreement problems, to the somewhat complex, such as appositives, participles, or rhetorical devices. At the end of the course, there is a large punctuation section that revises the usage of commas, colons, semicolons, hyphens, and apostrophes.